The Skinny: The Canadiens’ best players were their best players as Montreal defeated the Colorado Avalanche 3-2 Saturday night at the Bell Centre. P.K. Subban scored two goals and goaltender Carey Price played his strongest game of the season with 32 saves, including a game-saver on Jamie McGinn in front with 20 seconds remaining. It […]

MONTREAL —Daniel Brière hustled into the Colorado Avalanche dressing room at noon Thursday, tugging off his helmet and wading into a Bell Centre gaggle of curious. He had a few minutes to spare, quite literally — he spoke for three minutes and 21 seconds before he’d return to the ice, having been off skates for a couple of days.

Carey Price stood drained in front of his TD Garden stall last Wednesday in Boston and considered, with his usual is-it-bedtime-yet? expression, that his team was heading into the third round of the NHL playoffs for the second time in his seven-season career.

As the end of November — and Movember — neared last week, George Parros tweeted some fundraising news. Canada was first worldwide in money raised for the annual Movember campaign and the Canadiens were first among National Hockey League teams.

Erik Cole played 101 games in a Canadiens jersey, admittedly a drop in the 6,000-plus-game bucket of the franchise. But eight months after the veteran forward was traded to the Dallas Stars, he still holds dear the memory of having played for the Habs.

There is no way to imagine the hell on Earth endured the past two months by residents of Lac-Mégantic. The Quebec community was and, in many ways, remains devastated by the July 6 derailment of a runaway train and subsequent inferno of spilled light crude oil that claimed 47 lives.

When Marc Bergevin’s playing career ended in 2004 after a 20-year run in the National Hockey League, the defenceman knew he wanted to stay in the game. “You have to know what you know and what you don’t know,” the Canadiens’ rookie general manager said. “My whole life was based on hockey. My schooling stopped with CEGEP in Chicoutimi. Unless I was going back to school, I had to stay with what I knew best and what I loved, and that was hockey.

There’s an argument to be made — and Therrien himself will help make it — that the 48-year-old Montreal native is not the same man who was shown the Habs door in 2003 after his 190 games at the helm and a dozen more in the playoffs.

The Canadiens’ last-place finish should have been a sobering experience for hockey fans. This is, however, Montreal, where the notion of sobriety has never really caught on. Festival season is confined to summer, but joie de vivre is a 12-month way of life in our fair city.

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